Na-Dené languages Totally Explained

Everything about Na-den totally explained

Na-Dené (also Na-Dene, Nadene, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) is a proposed Native American language family which includes the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, Tlingit, and possibly Haida. The connection of Haida to the other languages is controversial. In February 2008 a proposal relating Na-Dene to the Yeniseian language Ket, spoken in Siberia, has been published and well received by a number of linguists(External Link

Family division

The Na-Dene family include:

Tlingit language: 700 speakers (Michael Krauss, 1995)

Athabaskan-Eyak

Eyak language: extinct in 2008
Athabaskan languages

Navajo is the most widely spoken language of the Na-Dené family, spoken in Arizona, New Mexico, and other regions of the American Southwest. Dene or Dine is a widely distributed group of Native languages and peoples spoken in Canada, Alaska, and parts of Oregon and northern California. Eyak was spoken in south central Alaska; the last speaker died in 2008.

Genetic relation proposals

Haida, with 15 fluent speakers (M. Krauss, 1995), was originally included in the proposed family by Franz Boas. Linguists such as Lyle Campbell (1997) today consider the evidence inconclusive and have classified Haida as a language isolate. In order to emphasise the exclusion of Haida, Campbell refers to the language family as Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit rather than Na-Dene.

Dené-Yeniseian

Recently, Professor Edward Vajda of Western Washington University has presented compelling evidence that the Na-Dene languages are actually related to Yeniseian (or Yeniseic) languages of Siberia., the only living representative of which is the Ket language. His paper has been favorably reviewed by several experts on Na-Dene and Yeniseic languages, including Michael Krauss, Jeff Leer, James Kari, and Heinrich Werner, as well as a number of other well-known linguists, including Bernard Comrie, Johanna Nichols, Victor Golla, Michael Fortescue, and Eric Hamp. It was also the conclusion of this seminar that this comparison of Yeniseic and Na-Dene "shows conclusively that Haida, sometimes associated with Na-Dene, isn't related."

Earlier Proposals

According to Joseph Greenberg's controversial classification of the languages of Native North America, Na-Dené-Athabaskan is one of the three main groups of Native languages spoken in the Americas, and represents a distinct wave of migration from Asia to the Americas. The other two are the widely accepted Eskimo-Aleut family, spoken in Siberia, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, and the far less widely accepted Amerind, Greenberg's most controversial classification, which includes every language native to the Americas that isn't Eskimo-Aleut or Na-Dené.
Contemporary supporters of Greenberg's theory such as Merritt Ruhlen have suggested that the Na-Dené language family represents a distinct migration of people from Asia to the New World. Ruhlen claims this migration occurred six to eight thousand years ago, placing it around four thousand years later than the previous migration into the Americas by Amerind speakers. Ruhlen speculates that the Na-Dené speakers may have arrived in boats, initially settling near the Queen Charlotte Islands, now in British Columbia, Canada. (External Link

) According to the similarly controversial theory of Sergei Starostin, Na-Dené is a member of the Dene-Caucasian superfamily, along with the North Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Yeniseian languages and Basque. This idea was considered by Edward Sapir. Most linguists, however, don't believe that these hypotheses rest on sufficiently sound linguistic data for them to deserve recognition.

Further Information

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